Amazon's Cloud Service May Have Just Opened Up A Whole New Market

Amazon Web Services' GovCloud (U.S.)
received provisional authorization to process 'controlled
unclassified' data under levels 3 to 5 from the U.S. Department
of Defense (DoD) on Thursday. AWS is the first cloud service to
win approval at the 3 to 5 levels.

AWS had the authority to cover
levels 1-2 data for all U.S. regions since March. But today’s
approval gives AWS authority to handle much more highly sensitive
data from DoD agencies. The DoD has
up to Level 6 security control baselines, with Level 6
handling classified workloads.

DoD’s official document
describes Level 1 confidentiality as, “Loss of confidentiality of
the information will have no impact, because the information has
been approved for public release.”

Level 5, on the other hand,
states, “The unauthorized disclosure of information could be
expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect on
organizational operations, organizational assets, or
individuals.”

With today’s announcement, AWS
just opened up a whole new market segment that could turn out to
be a pretty good revenue source for it. DoD agencies will also be
able to move workloads a lot faster now with much less
restrictions on the AWS GovCloud. AWS had more than 600
government agency clients, as of March of this year,
according to ZDNet.

The DoD has been making its
shift to the cloud lately, but the speed of cloud adoption has
been “fairly slow” because of the process of authorizing
security,
according to Defense Systems.

In fact, only four cloud
service vendors currently have approvals for levels 1 and 2, and
defense officials have been asking themselves if their Cloud
Security Model was “too demanding,” Defense Systems said.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his
personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.